Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived by Diane Flynt

Author:Diane Flynt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

In 1930 Will Messer accepted $35,405 in a condemnation settlement from the North Carolina Park Commission for his land and buildings. His 340-acre farm included three productive orchards full of southern apples, a twelve-room house with hot and cold running water and acetylene lights, several barns, two mills, and an apple house built to last several lifetimes. He believed his property was worth twice the price paid by the Park Commission, but, like most farmers, Messer chose not to litigate. He didn’t want to “take a chance with a picked jury [since] you never can tell who anybody is going to marry or what a jury will do.”37 Between 1930 and 1934, Messer and his family moved to Caldwell County, North Carolina, 150 miles east and 3,000 feet lower.

On September 2, 1940, at Newfound Gap on the Tennessee–North Carolina border about fifty miles west of Cataloochee, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In the next year, over 1 million people visited the park.

The white settlers in Cataloochee had created a community with only a hundred-year life span. Will Messer’s apple house, built to last over a century, housed apples for less than twenty years.

The Park Service burned most of the buildings. Dan Cook’s house collapsed in 1975. The park collected some of the timbers and relocated and restored Rachel Messer’s homeplace in 1999. The top floor of the apple house was removed and sold in the 1950s, likely for the chestnut wood. Once exposed to the weather, mortar between the thick stone walls crumbled. Ruins of Will Messer’s apple house still stand across the road from the original location of Dan Cook’s log home. Today, visitors to the Mountain Farm Museum at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center can see relocated homes and buildings that portray a reconstructed version of an Appalachian mountain community, including a handsome stone and hardwood apple house, empty of the sounds and smells of apple harvest.

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